Ruth

7.4.11

Ruth

Striding along broken sidewalks

beyond the one-car garage,

desert air on her eyelids,

in her gray eyes a medina, draped

in wool and silk, scented with sweet-hot  

mint tea, foaming in a clear glass,

bitter as everything she never did,

sparrow returning to its nest;

strong as love that lasted

half the time she’s spent

alone in a small brick house;

gentle as death, lifting her

above the neighborhood,

willing her plain garden

to children cutting through

to the meadow and the creek.

In the attic

In the attic, sweat trickles down the back

of my legs. Near the one window in the room,

Ria’s bright dollhouse, my aunts’ from the 40s, glows—

rooms painted new colors by my mother—turquoise,

canary, rose. The broken baby doll carriage

Dad made from a wicker basket, red

gingham sunshade strung on wire.

It took two days to work myself up to this trip

up the stairs. It took a bottle of wine.

It took digging my hands in wet dirt.

It took days to untangle the workweek,
the job I do like my dad did. 

I don’t want to look in the cardboard

box, the box my mother found when it was time

to pack Dad’s files, the file in my name, every

school picture report card softball roster—

file of the first born, cheeks-of-tan, chubby, crooked-teeth

girl in the 1976 Osage Elementary bicentennial yearbook, ponytailed in

the St. Raphael Archangel class shot, half-day kindergarten,

1972, not chubby yet. Trophy-holding tween in a black-and-white

glossy, in the sundress Mom made (it was yellow). Handmade

cards to Dad, a postcard from my first trip to New York. 

The floor seems to shift, like the cheap carnie funhouse at the St. Bernie festival. This is not

what I was looking for. I wanted my old portfolio. I wanted to see what I made before

the kids came. In this box I’m in the back seat breathing my dad's smoke. 

I only take what’s misfiled. The envelope from the hospital where I was born,

with my sister’s birth date and weight instead of mine, no baby picture inside.

A no-vacancies letter from the Coca-Cola Company, dated 1928, my grandma’s

last job hunt? An envelope stuffed after my first layoff, six years ago, cubicle detritus.

Look at this—the photos of Ria and Jake at the ranch, at the beach. Jake’s first attempt
to write his name, Ria's first notes, every little
scrap. See what she wrote? When I close
my eyes
I hear tires
on the crumbling

cement of the driveway.

There's something on the wind

 4.2.11

There’s something on the wind

There’s something on the wind, something I thought

I wanted, someplace I wanted to be

way back. It’s blowing in

from the west, messing up

the underbrush, tousling

limp daffodils. Big-wind

aspiration, invocation,

valediction. Calling back

who I was, who I wanted.

Calling it back. Sending it off

with all good wishes. Somewhere

back in Kansas it took off, blew itself

across the Atlantic, tripped up in milo

on the way back round, demurring so well,

dust in the corner of the fireplace. It didn’t quite

catch up, didn’t quite insist upon its own way.

Hot box of boys

3.18.11

Hot box of boys*

I.

When the boy in the blue singlet looks up to you, your arms scoop,

your hands dip. Get behind him, get behind him…

                                                                                                                      

The boys dance till the boy in red shoots, grips the boy in blue’s

legs, then his ribs, a bird’s ribs in a trap of limbs. Fierce-faced, red boy splays, spins

his legs, winds himself like a crank. Brute force! Brute force! Get his shoulder

crossways. Blue boy arches his back, all 40 pounds of him taut. Boysweat

hangs in the gym, billows in a yeasty cloud. A chignoned

mother shifts her slim buns in the bleachers.

C’mon Auggie. Get up, she says. Fight!

In and out and in and out goes the ref’s hand.

You are on your knees, on all fours. Reaching for the boy in blue, lifting 
the way you want him to lift, roaring so he can hear you, so he can feel 
the vibration of your voice, so he can feel his next move.  

II.

Is this the sound of boys becoming men?

Deep, staccato shouts, groans and squeaks, men’s ancient exercises, warriors in the ludus—whistles trilling, sudden tears, cries of boys who creep to the edges of the arena.

Is this some homoerotic dream?

A boy’s head’s trapped between another's knees, a boy’s belly pressed into another’s backside. No, it’s not, or it is. But there’s no snicker yet. Arms, shoulders, thighs—all free 
to touch for now.

Is this why we had the second child?

If we hadn’t made love that Fourth of July, we wouldn’t be here in this hot box of boys.

They wouldn’t look up to you before their battles. They wouldn’t hug your legs at the fish fry.

III.

I squirmed our son’s first time. Our tiny boy on the mat—I worried he’d be hurt, that his small neck would snap, or his arms would twist impossibly. I pictured bruises and blood. But everything he ever did wrong was right on the mat. No need for hands off, sit still, not so rough. He won and he won and he won. In the final today, in seven seconds, he pins the other boy.

Now he’s kneeling matside, blue-ribboned medal round his neck, saying
the same things you say. Pressure, pressure—turn up the heat. Hold him, 
hold him—take him down.

The whole Saturday, we’ve spent it in this box. Is this what you expected when you gave 
in, and we decided to do this kid thing again? Did it cross your mind 
at the hospital, when you first held the boy who looked like you?

IV.

You’ve shelved your ambitions for the season.

Instead of writing, you surf flowrestling.org.            

Instead of reading, you line up the one-man, two-man little guys in Scecina’s block house.

You count days in your calendar till the season ends, but you print out certificates for each boy. At a restaurant, you draw designs for new singlets on the paper that covers the table.

V.

In this swarm of boys, you're the weather vane that holds true.

Each boy in blue catches your eyes. His courage peeks

out from his singlet, a flat, rosy breast.

Oh, your big talk, that talk I fell in love with. Talk and talk and talk. That talk fermented in a torched barrel.  It changed into something smooth, something that’s going to last. You’ve flipped yourself inside out, barked yourself hoarse. I’ve watched you pat a hundred bottoms, shake a hundred hands. 

Tonight you’ll fill the bath for our son. He’ll hang another medal in his crowded case.

Next week will be the end-of-season pizza party, and St. Pat’s Guinness at the Golden Ace,

and the boys will disappear to the green fields with mitts and cleats.

Tonight you’ll retire to the box of this house, the box of this room with its tatty furniture and ratty ferns. You’ll put your feet on the wobbly ottoman. Through the open window, we’ll hear the hotrods wind round the Speedrome’s dirt track. 

*This could be a love poem: To my husband coaching at the St. Michael of Indy City Finals Little Guys Wrestling Tournament, March 12, 2011

About work

After the fish were cleaned

What the poem is really about. What the picture is really about. I want to tell you but I don't want to tell you. It's not that I want to control you. It's that I'd like a little more mystery in the process. If the poem is about something essential, something personal, not really funny,  do you really need all the context? Or would the context make the experience better? Would the critique be less helpful if the readers already knew the whole story?

The theme of the last poem (Hack)--the theme of work--is something I talked about with Yusef Komunyakaa when he came to Butler last year. Work as a theme. Work's power to heal, its rhythms, its traditions in a family and a culture.

In my own family, my father (circa 1964, above) worked all week at a not-so-glamorous white-collar job, worked all weekend around the house, sweating beer. When I work with my son--shoveling or raking or digging--I feel like I'm working side-by-side with my father again. I'm interested in that physical, sensual experience of two humans at work together. Or an animal and a human having the same physical experience at the same time, like when I run with my dogs. I'm planning to expand that poem into more sections and grapple with the larger theme and its origins.

For Komunyakaa, the theme of work touches on issues about race and sexuality, at least it does in his poem "Work," for example (the poem (on someone's blog!) and some interesting analysis). I think when he spoke to me about work as a theme, he was talking about something else--how the process of working can lead to something larger. Here's what Komunyakaa said about the work of writing:

"The body and the mind are indeed connected," he has said. "Good writing is physical and mental. I welcomed the knowledge of this because I am from a working-class people who believe that physical labor is sacred and spiritual."  (Source: "Control Is the Mainspring," Blue Notes: Essays, Interviews, and Commentaries, University of Michigan Press series; afropoets.net)

Labor, physical and not-so-physical, has a broader context for me too--in my life right now--the life I'm boxed into as a result of my own choices, just like everyone else. I want to rejoice in the work. I want to rejoice in the box.

Design and the agony of knowing

I seem to be channeling Sherman Alexie's power to offend--mildly, but it's happening. I don't mean to be critical of everyone's blog design. It's just hard to stop myself from commenting on it. Once you enter the world of design--and we have--design matters. If we're blogging, we're writers, designers and publishers.

When I say that just because you can add different pictures or effects to a blog doesn't mean you have to, that's all I mean. Using all the tricks is a little bit like using colored type or emoticons in your writing. You don't need all the tricks. You need just enough tricks to showcase what's important, and for most of us that's the writing.

Some stuff I found:

Examples of  great blog design.

Blog design ideas (scroll down for blogs or type in the category)

A few tips I found.

Projeqt (Wow! I signed up for a beta account)

Sunday (part 2 of 2)

Sunday (part 1 of 2)

Hack

Yesterday in the thaw, a sudden

satisfaction: Hacking with a shovel at ice

three inches thick, blue-white and wet,

softening into  snow-cone.

I didn’t intend to help.

I only wanted to prove

the work could be done.

Bent in a right angle, lifting the shovel, I said

the ice would relent, loosen itself into sheets,

no salt needed, a continent

exploding into islands

ready for Jake to scoop away.

I was so right. Wrists rattled as I sliced

with the edge of the shovel, pounded

each stroke with a smack

on the sweet spot, blasting

ice into smile-shaped stones,

a rhythm in my legs and hips,

lifting and smashing, working

beyond what was on my mind,

in unison with Jake, the excavator: “Good

job, Mom,” he said, “you’re good at this,”

till we broke through to shining pavement,

till the effort healed us in the dripping light.

This land

Forgive me my trespassing.

This land is your land,

farmhouse, for-sale sign,

soybean field plastered white.

This land is not my land,

but the west wind tossed me

across the street, muck boots

soiled from the stable. I slipped

toward the treeline

through brambles, sunlit

stubble, abandoned

deerstand, twisted

mulberry, moving across it
like it was mine.

John & John

For John Hibbard (second from left, back row), coach, dad and friend, and John Chase (far right, back row), my own coach and dad, in suburban heaven--tennis courts and cold beer forever.  

John & John

The line is violet, gold

in the light, the edge

of a snowdrift, ground glass

lifting in the wind,

settling into a shadowed border.

John crossed over

endlessly grinning,

spirogyra in his head,

tangled in years at a chain-link fence,

encouraging his daughter, her line drive or a drive

down the line.  Now he’s gone.

Gone to meet old friends,

another John,

my father.

Are they spinning

through their days

at that fence, drifting

to the tennis court—

their turn to play, to Saturday

doubles, in sweaty whites, moving

across green asphalt,

pale lines shifting—

a yellow ball tossed by a strong hand.

Let them rest now on a wooden bench.

Let them reach warm palms into a bucket

of ice. I hear them popping silver cans.

Blog as box

Mes objects trouvés

Things I’ve found.

Things in a box.

A box to open when there’s time.

That’s my experiment. I’m going to dig through real boxes, crumbling cardboard in the attic, to find real things that snag me. It’s so easy to be snagged.  That’s the reason for the boxes. In the house, there’s nothing but rocks on the windowsill to remind me where I’ve been—no pictures at all—or I’d never move. 

This job is to stop moving. To discover what the snags are all about. Are they worth it? For me or for someone else? What will happen if I pull one piece out at a time and treat it like an object—a  piece in my own roadside museum? Can it become a poem? What’s the difference between the box in my attic or the box I make in a cloud? Will someone notice my snags? Will they matter? Is this just narcissistic? Or is each post a window into someone else? I want to find out. That’s my experiment.